No Turning Back
by fulleraaron
Summary: A work-in-progress story set during the earlier part of Reacher's army career. He is sent to investigate suspected thefts of equipment at a large base in Michigan. I'd like some feedback on whether I'm on the right track. Given that it's a Reacher story, there will be some violent scenes, although none of them are in the document yet.


No Turning Back

1.

The message was like a crossword puzzle clue. It wasn't one of the crosswords that you solved by swapping one word for another that basically meant the same thing. It was more like one of the longer clues; one where all the individual words made sense, but the overall message didn't. A _New York Times _crossword kind of a message. Definitely not _USA Today_.

Master Sergeant Martinez brought it to me. He interrupted my coffee to do it, but that was OK, because that meant it was important. I liked Martinez; a very capable guy with a sense of humour. It's like that sportswriter said about Ali back in the day; a credit to his race. Except the sportswriter was talking about the _human_ race_, _and I'm talking about senior noncoms. They're not just a different race, but a totally different species from us. But for a guy as good as Martinez, getting commissioned was going to be an inevitable part of his future. It was going to hurt him.

'Note from Colonel G, Cap.' said Martinez, passing a piece of paper over to me, with it lying across his cupped palms, like he was making an offering to a minor god. Like I say, he has a sense of humour.

'Did you read it?'

'Of course I read it. What kind of an investigator would I be if I hadn't? No envelope? General G writes you a note and doesn't seal it, and you expect me _not _to read it? He was practically _begging _us to, Cap.'

'That's not the point.'

'That's _exactly _the point. He was testing your people, making sure we were looking after you, you know?'

'What?'

'I mean suppose we hadn't read it. Or checked it, anyway. It could be anything. There could be anthrax powder between the fold, or acid, or a poison dart ready to flick right into your chest soon as you picked it up. Poison in the ink, even, like in that book about the real old Scottish guy in the monastery. _C__olour of the Rose, _or some crap? All kinds of ways a surprise package could kill you. I'm surprised at you for not knowing, frankly, sir. I had heard that your investigative skills were better than that. I'm disappointed in you.'

'_Name _of the Rose_, _sergeant. And I'm suitably chastised. But touched.'

'Don't be, sir. Keeping you alive is what they pay me for. It's nothing personal. The army's just spent too much money on your education – including on books about flowers – to let you kill yourself by being stupid. Besides, we all wanted to see what the note said.'

'I'm touched anyway. Now get the hell out while I read it myself.' Martinez nodded, about-faced and left, without a salute. He knew I wouldn't have wanted to have to stand up to return his one. Good man.

I picked up the note and opened it out. Garber's script, certainly. Strong, decisive and distinct, like a crime-scene fingerprint properly caught in powder.

R,

F&C, 0900, BDUs w/o, rpt W/O mkgs rank/MOS/ID.

G, Lt-Col, OC 53 MP

The clock on my wall said it was 0840. I had the time, if I got right on it. I got up, locked my office door, and got started.

I needed a blade. Not big, because the job would need to be neat. A bayonet would have been too big and clumsy, even if I'd had one. Which I didn't. I opened my desk drawer, and rummaged around between the notepads and rulers and pens and other army-issue stationery, and pulled out a switchblade, with an old handle but an oiled spring and a sharpened blade. I don't like knives, usually. I have no particular talent with them. But this one was different. I'd carried it around, over and across four continents for over 25 years, since I was six years old. It was probably the oldest friend I'd ever had. Certainly the most loyal one.

I put the blade in the palm of my left hand and opened the closet at the back of my office with my right. I pulled down the oldest of the BDU jackets I kept in there, and carried it across the office and lay it flat on my desk, front side up.

The first part was easy. I opened up the blade, and held the jacket's right sleeve with my left hand. With my right hand I slashed upwards along the length of the sleeve, from a point halfway between the elbow and the shoulder to a point maybe six inches higher. The piece of cloth I'd cut through unfolded, and lay right there on the desk, behind the sleeve, face down. Behind where the patch had sat when it had been whole was the undamaged sleeve. It was much darker than the rest of the jacket. It was the part that hadn't been bleached by the sun.

The next part didn't need the knife. I lay it gently on the desk, and with my right hand I opened up a button on the front of the jacket and slid off the olive green rectangular patch that had sat vertically on the chest.

The third part needed the knife again. I held down the jacket's left lapel with my left arm, and with my right hand I picked up the blade again and used it to cut the jacket. Not the actual jacket. I sliced through the stitching that held the four sides of the three-inch long, three-quarter-inch tall, olive green rectangle that had been attached to the _front_ of the actual jacket. All four sides of a three-inch long, three-quarter inch high rectangle. Seven-and-a-half inches in total. Maybe eighty stitches, all in. Good work for bad pay, by somebody. And I'd ruined it, in less than four seconds. Somewhere, if she'd known, some factory worker in China or Vietnam or Korea would have been disgusted with me.

But orders were orders. Even for me.

I left the desecrated jacket on my desk, and gathered up the pieces I'd just stripped off. Three olive green rectangles of various sizes and designs. One had been an armband. It had white 'MP' lettering stitched into it. I might have sliced open the band, but I'd left the lettering alone. Maybe the Chinese or Vietnamese or Korean lady would forgive me, for that small mercy. Maybe.

The second piece, although most definitely not in its proper place right now, was intact, at least.

The third piece made me pause for a second. It was between the other two in terms of size, but way out front in terms of significance. I looked at the bold, black lettering on it, seven letters, read left to right. To take off the other two pieces was a desecration. But to take off this piece was like a rape.

But orders were orders. Even for me.

I shucked off the BDU jacket I had been wearing, and swapped it for the desecrated one. It was very loose. I remembered that I'd lost a lot of weight since I last worn this one. Fifty pounds, maybe. It made the jacket so loose that it was slack. Like the sort of jacket a homeless guy would wear, to cover as much of himself as he could, for Winter weather. And it wasn't just oversize, but thanks to the knifework it looked old and faded too, at least in parts.

I thought about tossing the three loose pieces of cloth into the trash, but I might need them again.

I picked them up and stuffed them into a pocket. BDUs have lots of pockets. Since about 6000 BC, soldiers have been discovering new ways to 'find' things. The clothing suppliers have, by and large, been just as good at discovering new ways to keep those things close and convenient to hand.

I walked to my office door, unlocked it, walked through it into the corridor beyond, and out into the fresh Virginia air. I'd walked that route a hundred times before, but not this way. Not dressed – or undressed, maybe – like this. Because as far as anyone who saw me was concerned, I didn't look myself. Specifically, I was not _Reacher_, a _Captain _in the US Army _Military Police_.

Garber's note wasn't a puzzle at all, really. It had been so explicit that it would have been X-rated, if you knew the code.

R,

F&C, 0900, BDUs w/o, rpt W/O mkgs rank/MOS/ID.

G, Lt Col, OC 53 MP

_Reacher,_

_In front of my desk at nine this morning, wearing Battledress Uniform, without, I repeat WITHOUT, markings indicating your rank, Military Occupational Speciality or name._

_Leon Garber, Lietenant-Colonel, Officer Commanding 53rd Company,_ _Military Police _

Orders were orders. Even for me.

2.

As I walked to Garber's office, I got very little attention. I should have been getting plenty. I usually do. I stand out like a Christmas tree in the middle of a mosque, a lot of the time. Even in my new, sub-fighting weight, a six-five tall, two-hundred pound guy should be noticeable, whatever the context. People think that the army is full of big, weightlifter type people, but it isn't. It's full of _tough _people, which is different. A lot of army time is spent running and jogging, and small, lean guys are good for that, on the whole. It's basic physiology. To move from point A to point B, you have to move your own bodyweight, and the bigger you are, the harder that is.

Ordinarily, the uniform helps me blend in, but today it should have sent my noticability quotient up a notch. Because a soldier walking round a post without any kind of identification markings was unusual, to the point of weirdness. It might even make people nervous, at some level. The tiny, vestigial part of their brains was whispering _something doesn't smell right here. Keep away _into their minds.

But instead of all the normal attention I got because of my size, plus a slug more for the desecrated uniform, I walked among people all the way from my office to Garber's, and nobody said a damn thing to me all the way there. It was like I was a ghost.

I knew why. I might as well have been invisible. People didn't see me at all.

The human brain 1.0 is essentially a pattern-recognising machine. All day long, from the moment you wake up to the moment you close your eyes to sleep, you see and hear and touch and smell and taste a million things, every colour of the spectrum and every size from a dust mote to a Boeing 747. If a guy tried to actually think about all of these things, his brain would explode. (A woman's too, probably. But women make better multitaskers apparently, so maybe not.)

So before the lizard grew some arms and evolved into a smart biped, it figured out that it had to sort the million things into a few basic, recognisable patterns. Six-foot tall, one-foot wide, non-reflecting, moving thing with four, or a minimum three, appendages? Probably a person. Fifteen-foot long, five feet wide, shiny thing that squats on the ground and moves around with a low, warbling, rumbling sound? Automobile, almost certainly.

There are people who, after very particular kinds of brain injury, forget how to form patterns out of what they sense. They can still get the data from their senses, just not put it together. It might not sound like much, but it really screws up their lives. It's tragic. They can spend twenty minutes looking at a glove or a hat before they can work out what they're supposed to do with it. They emd up kicking the heads of people they walk past on the beach, because to them, the roughly-round things they see in a relaxing, relational context look more like soccer balls than a fundamental piece of someone's body. Patterns are essential. You literally can't live without them.

All of which is a fancy way of explaining what one of my instructors once taught me about good camouflage.

Everybody thinks that camouflage is about making you look like something you aren't. That's mostly true. If you're sitting in a field in Germany when the Russians roll in, you will definitely find time previously spent trying to look like a typical German hedge to be a good investment. The Russians are thorough, but even they can't assume that every single piece of foliage they see as they advance through the Fulda Gap might actually be a US anti-tank platoon. The most fanatical _zampolit _in the Red Army would have to forgive a guy for saying 'Oh, come on, sir, it's just a damn _hedge!_' occasionally.

But sometimes, looking like something else isn't practical. It's almost impossible to make some things look like West German foliage. Believe me, we've tried it. It's mostly the heavy metal. M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks. Apache Attack Helicopters. M2 Bradley Infantry Carriers. Plus whatever the Navy and the USAF are packing these days. I don't know whether we have any battleships anymore. But you can't make an aircraft carrier look like a porpoise, that's for damn sure.

This is where my camouflage instructor's slice of genius comes in. Because he used to say _look like something you're not. But if you can't do that, don't look like what you are_.

And as I walked from my office to Garber's, the instructor's words came back. I didn't look like a German hedge. But in my old, faded and slack BDUs and without my MP's armband, name tape and rank slide, I didn't look much like a soldier, either. So the pattern-recognition systems in everyone I saw – and who looked at me but didn't _see _me – didn't kick in. So I didn't register. It was like I wasn't there. I could have been a ghost.

Garber's handwriting was the only neat thing about him. He was legendary within the service for everything else about him being dishevelled and unkempt. An hour after putting on any uniform in the field manual, and he looked like a homeless person even _without_ an oversized set of BDUs.

Personally I think his car-crash look must be at least partly deliberate. Nobody could be as unkempt as he is, all the time, _accidentally_, and get through OCS, let alone make flag rank as fast as he has. He uses camouflage too. People immediately file him away under the 'Indisciplined, lazy time-server' pattern. Threat quotient? Absolute zero to anybody and anything, except the post tailor shop's reputation. And he'd stay in that mental file for long enough for him to sneak up on people. Suspects, prisoners, fugitives, they'd all made that mistake. Eventually they'd reassess, and refile him under the 'Cunning son of a gun' pattern, obviously. Too late, _then_. The inside of the stockade cell walls would look the same.

As I stood in front of his desk, as ordered, I wondered whether this whole thing was some kind of joke. Maybe he was trying to make me feel what it's like to look like him. The shiny silver oak-leaf on his chest was the only part of his uniform that deserved to be actually worn by somebody. The rest only looked good for being doused in fuel and used for incinerator kindling. And the rank slide was only good because it was new. In two weeks time, Garber would have owned it for three weeks, and that would be that. It would take its rightful place in the Garber sartorial hall of decrepitude.

'Colonel, I haven't looked it up recently, but I'm pretty certain that we don't have penal battalions any more. So, what's with the stripping down of the uniform thing?' I said.

'I'm not trying to punish you for anything. God knows, you deserve to be punished for lots of things. But if I was trying to punish you, I'd just cut off your coffee supply. You'd be squealing for your Mother within a half hour.'

'So what's the story?'

'I wanted to have you model for a new look.'

'We're not real big on gratuitous changes of wardrobe, sir.'

'I know that. It's going to an _authorised_ new look. An _undercover _new look_.'_

_'_What's the part I'm supposed to be auditioning for – second hobo on the railcar?'

'11-B.'

'I can live with that. I can shoot pretty well. As long as it's _Army_ infantry, not a Marine. That would be a fate worse than death.'

'Yeah, army. So you get to keep your hair. Some of it, anyway. And you won't be a total grunt. We'll be presenting you as an E-5, so you'll be allowed to form coherent sentences and write joined-up words. Occasionally.'

'Why?'

'Why are we making you an E-5, or why will you be allowed to write sentences? I told you, it'll only be an occasional thing.'

'Why an E-5?'

'You're too old to be anything below that. Funny thing; men over thirty typically do not tend to spontaneously cash in their pensions at Wal-Mart, having decided that repeatedly charging uphill, straight towards the enemy, is a better career option. As soon as guys get over their hill, they decide that they don't want to start running up one that belongs to someone else. So, the story will be that you've career infantry, but you've just done a deployment in the Gulf – again – and you're thinking of a change to a different MOS.'

'That's not a story. Those are facts. I _have_ just done a deployment in the Gulf. _Again_. I left fifty pounds of myself in it. The prisoners we arrested got more food than us. Our major food group was _sand_. By the end of my tour, we were virtually getting sympathy handouts from Arab refugees. Some of them were _Iraqi_.'

'You see, you're getting into it already. The rest of it is all in here. Take a look.'

Garber slid a jacketed file across the desk to me, and said nothing more. I opened the file, and started to read.

The Operation name always sat at the top of page one of any file. This one was called 'Operation Perpetual', which didn't fill me with immediate enthusiasm. I've always been happier with missions called things like 'Quick Win' and 'Easy Victory'. But at least this one wasn't called one of the ridiculous names that the Pentagon staff officers liked so much – stuff like 'Blue Spoon' and 'Nifty Dolphin'. The last time I saw a blue spoon one was in my cereal bowl when I was three years old. And in my experience, nifty dolphins are rarer than porpoise-shaped aircraft carriers.

Right below the Op name was the mission statement. In a company report it would have been the 'Mission Statement'. But the Army was the original institution that had missions – companies are just trying to look tough by using the term. So we don't bother with the quote marks. The mission for 'Perpetual' was 'To identify, interdict and terminate any and all illegal activities at, or concerning, the motor pool at US Army Camp Grayling, Michigan'.

I looked up at Garber to try and catch his expression, but he said nothing, and waited until I read on.

I didn't read on, or at least not down. My eyes went sideways, to the photo that was clipped to the side of the page. The photo was a head-and-shoulders shot of me, a few years younger and wearing a a Class-A uniform. But I was wearing some other guy's jacket.

There were some differences. Not in the fit or colour of the jacket, but the badges on it.

Instead of the lieutenant's silver bars I would have been wearing at the time, you could just see the golden point of a set of sergeant's chevrons poking into the shot, on 'my' left arm. The set of medal ribbons on 'my' chest was basically the same, but without the striped red, white and blue bar that should have indicated that the holder had won the Silver Star. Sitting above the row of ribbons was an award I never earned – a white rifle sitting on a blue square; a Combat Infantryman's Badge, or CIB. There was a silver star above it. This was a nice touch; it indicated a second award. Finally, the black acetate name badge on 'my' left chest didn't say 'Reacher'. It said 'Coolidge'.

Four differences, and three possible reasons. One, I had a twin who'd changed his name and had a less successful Army career than me. No dice there – my brother was in the Army, but he was a captain too. And we looked alike, but not _that _alike.

Second option was that I'd gone on the bar crawl from hell three years back and woke up wearing some other guy's uniform. I couldn't positively rule that one out. I didn't remember that happening, but then _by_ _definition_, I wouldn't remember it. That would be the point. But I'm not one for monumental bar crawls. I don't get invited to many, for a start. I'm an MP. There's a reason why one of the more polite words that the rest of the Army has for us is 'fun police'. When we turn up at a party, it's usually to break it up with batons, dogs and tear gas, not give it a little extra zip.

So the third option was most likely. They had taken a real photograph of me and airbrushed it to match the identity I had been assigned for 'Perpetual'.

'What do you think?' asked Garber. 'About the photo?'

'I think you could have found a more recent one. What is this, three years ago? Who did you use, a lab tech or the madam of a dating agency?' I said.

'We had to go back three years to find one of you smiling.'

'You telling me I haven't smiled in three years?'

'Not that anyone who's ever worked with you knows about.'

'It's because of the people I've worked with that I've been miserable.'

'You've been working for _me _for three years.'

I said nothing.

Eventually Garber said 'Your wounded pride aside, what do you make of the legend?'

'Pretty good. _Very g_ood job on the airbrushing. They got the medals spot on. Where is the CIB supposed to be from?'

'Well, the latest one's from the Storm, obviously. The first one was Grenada. Sorry you had to lose the Silver Star, though.' Garber said.

I didn't mean that 'Coolidge's' medals were the same as mine. I meant that whoever did the airbrushing did it once, and did it right. He didn't just edit out my silver star and say 'good enough for government work'. That would have left a hole in the row, like the gap an English dentist would have made taking out a tooth. The airbrusher had taken the time to take out the star and then shuffle up the others one step each, to make a smooth, even row.

Details like that are important. Important with undercover legends, in particular. It's like General Powell, who'd just led us to a 'Stormin' victory over Saddam, once said: check small things. His detail was to remember to triple-check the parachutes before jumping out of a C-130 over Germany. He stopped one of his guys becoming a 400-pound freefall bomb. My airbrusher's check might stop someone from spotting that Coolidge wasn't real, and start asking who I really was. If that happened, then how I ended up might make the fate avoided by Powell's guy a blessing by comparison.

I nodded. To have left such a significant award as the Silver Star for Valour on 'Coolidge's' chest would have just invited questions that I could do without having to answer. And a repeat CIB was a shred choice; an infantryman of Coolidge's experience would have expected to have come under fire at least twice. And I had actually been in Grenada, so if anyone asked about it, I could have plausibly talked about it. Check small things.

'The guy _was_ good. But it's not airbrushing.' said Garber.

'So how did he do it?' I said.

'Some new computer graphic thing. They put it together with the Brits, during the Storm. Called a jay-peg, or something. They turn the picture into a whole load of little squares, which you can squirt down a comlink more easily than with whole images. It also means that the photo editor guys at this end can edit those little squares individually, one at a time. By the time you print it, it looks 100% original.'

'Outstanding. I'm sure the counterfeiter's union of America love it.'

'Maybe. But I'll tell you who don't – the intel analysts at Langley.'

'More imagery, faster? What's not to like? That's like an artilleryman griping about having too many shells.'

'Well, now the analysts can't bitch about their assessments only being wrong because the images were two days old and there weren't enough of them anyway. So, now they bitch that the assessments are wrong because they get so much material they don't have time to look at it all properly.'

'Backroom guys bitching – nothing new there.' I said.

'You aren't exactly filling my office with rays of sunshine either, Reacher.'

'How pleased would you be if you'd just discovered you'd had your best medal stolen, been busted back to E-5, _and _had your name changed to _Coolidge_, or all things?'

'What's the matter? An ex-president's name not good enough for you?'

'Not _that _ex-president. When he died, somebody asked 'How can they tell?'. I'm really going to struggle for gravitas with a name like that.'

'You'll have to improvise. Adapt. Overcome.'

'That's not even the Army. That's the Marines. We're 'Be the best'.

'Always. Carry on, sergeant Coolidge.'

3.

Later, I sat in my room in the Quarters, and went through the whole of the file. It was substantial, and intriguing. Operation 'Perpetual' was the Army's response to the fact that since a few weeks after the Gulf War had ended, the efficiency numbers for the motor pool at Camp Grayling had gone through the toilet, for no apparent reason.

Numbers aren't everything. It's hard to assign a meaningful number to something like a rifleman's morale, or an MP's investigative ability. When I describe a woman as a 'ten', it doesn't literally mean she is in the top decile of the female population. But numbers aren't a total waste of time, either. Especially when you're dealing with objective information. A vehicle either works, or it doesn't. And right now, Grayling's – at least the ones served by their own, on-base crew, the 75th Mechanical Aid Detachment, or MAD, mostly didn't. In the space of a few months, the serviceability of its vehicle fleet had gone from being on the good side of unremarkable, to downright awful.

This was significant, because Grayling was significant. This wasn't some dinky little outfit in the sticks, which nobody would ever find except by accident. It was one of the largest camps in the country. It spread over thee counties. It was big enough that you could drop a small European country into it, with space left over.

One of the reasons for its size was the same reason for its substantial population. It's the largest national guard training area in the country. And especially right now, that made for a lot of traffic. Guard units had been shuffling in and out of it for the last two years, in huge numbers – sixty-five thousand Guardsmen ended up being deployed for Desert Shield, and then the Storm that came after it. Most of those were what the field manual calls 'Combat Support' troops – guys who are at, or near, the front, but not actually engaging the enemy. The term covered all the trades you suddenly need a lot more of when you have a big, unexpected deployment, somewhere that six months earlier, you hadn't expected to be. Engineers, medics, communications people, MPs, logistics guys.

And mechanics. Because a big, mechanised army has a lot of vehicles, and although everybody gets taught the basics, most of the vehicles are complicated enough to need a lot of maintaining by specialists. Since the Cavalry handed back its horses, all of our vehicles have worked on some sort of combustion engine, and they all basically work the same way. You suck air into a chamber, mix it with fuel, make it go bang, and then use the energy from the explosion to move something from A to B. The bigger the vehicle, the bigger the bang you needed, which meant more fuel. Hence, the logistics guys. But it also meant you needed more air. It takes a lot of very big bangs to move an Abrams tank. Some of our vehicles sucked in air like a whale sucks in water – hundreds of cubic metres, all day long. Normally this isn't a problem, unless you're underwater. But in Arabia, the sand got everywhere. I was only half-joking when I told Garber that it was our major food group in the Gulf. From the time I spent there, I'd probably be seeing sand I thought I'd left behind in the desert reappear in all kinds of places. Falling out of pockets, spilling out from between folds in map sheets, small clouds of it appearing every time I patted a uniform jacket, everywhere. It would probably be in my handkerchief the next time I blew my nose.

And for the best part of a year, we had been taking a vehicle fleet that was designed to suck up the clear, crisp air of the German plains, and throwing it around the world's biggest sand table. Sand isn't just pervasive. It's also abrasive. It doesn't just clog stuff up; it wears it down. There's a reason why, when you want to clean something really well, you don't 'dustblast' it.

And on top of the dirtier air, we'd been doing way more mileage than we'd planned for. Because we hadn't been engaged in the expected slow, managed, tenacious retreat, in the face of the massed assaults by the Red Army tank divisions. Instead, we'd been the ones doing the advancing.

Take an Olympic athlete who's been training in, say, Ohio. Then dump him in Death Valley, double his training programme, and start sprinkling broken glass onto each of his meals. That's basically what we had been doing to our vehicles in the Gulf. It should have been a disaster. By the second day, we should have had to get out and walk. But instead, we drove through Iraq and Kuwait faster than TV news crews could learn to spell 'manoeuvre warfare'. We could have stayed buttoned-up all the way to Baghdad.

My guys and I covered a lot of ground other there, chasing crimes from one unit to another, all over the Theatre of Operations. The state of our food supply didn't help – it sucked the energy out of us after a while, to the point that we started driving a few hundred yards from one parking lot to another, just to save a few calories. Since we couldn't drink gasoline, letting the wheels do the walking was definitely the way to go. I personally must have driven, or ridden, about a thousand miles in various trucks, Humvees and APCs. Between us all, ten or twenty times that. And I couldn't remember any of us having a serious problem with a vehicle. Not once.

It was uncomfortable a lot of the time, certainly. The only air conditioning we could get was by taking off the doors. And something somewhere was usually rattling, banging or shimmying at a volume proportional to your speed. But nothing ever totally broke down. Nobody ever saw a soldier standing by the side of the road next to a broken-down vehicle, with his thumb in the air, hitching a ride. It just didn't happen.

But now pretty much everything was breaking down at Grayling. The most obvious explanation was sheer incompetence. But the guys in the motor pool at Grayling were among the people that kept the same types of vehicle running so well on the 'broken glass diet' in the desert for a year.

So basic competence wasn't likely to be the problem. For the 75th MAD to have gone from the performance they exhibited in Arabia, to where they were at now, purely on the basis of incompetence, would have needed pretty much all of them to have been lobotomised somewhere between Riyadh and the States.

But effectiveness wasn't all about natural talent and training. A major part of it – some would say the dominant part – is commitment. This wouldn't be the first time that a unit had performed with distinction in the field and then taken a dive for the canvas when they got back to barracks. It happens so often that we even have a name for it. We call it 'Hitting the ROAD'. Retired On Active Duty. People we call ROAD Warriors. Among other things.

If that's what was happening here, it would be understandable. No matter how much guys want to get home after a year's deployment, it's still deflating to go from a full-on war to being based on a camp where there's nothing to do except get frustrated that there's next to nothing within hundreds of miles, except Detroit. Getting bored, and maybe even a little bitter, would be understandable.

But not acceptable. Not even a little bit. Because whether the 75th knew it or not, people were still depending on them doing a job. The vehicles they were responsible for were needed by someone, somewhere. Guardsmen, and regulars, were still passing through Grayling on the way out to the Gulf, to relieve the guys who'd been out there all through the War. The new guys needed wheels and tracks, too.

And we still had an armoured Corps in Germany. Ivan may be down, but as far as we could tell, he wasn't out, yet. Hitler may have made the mistake of confusing those two things, but we weren't going to, that was for sure, The intel people said that the Russians weren't just pretending to be angry at us for setting up training bases in Poland and Ukraine, right in their backyard. They really _were _angry.

Whether in the Gulf or Europe, or anywhere else you wanted to talk about it, the Green Machine still needed its stuff to work. And if Grayling's people weren't pulling their weight, then that meant that some other unit somewhere was taking the strain. Somewhere that was probably a lot less comfortable than the Great Lakes. So lack of effort was not acceptable. Not at all.

The camp's own MP unit had added another hypothesis to incompetence and idleness. Criminality was suspected. The local guys made quiet, but nonetheless thorough, enquiries. Personnel records were checked. Enquiries had been made. Paperwork was reviewed. Equipment holdings had been audited. Vehicles, barrack rooms and even, as a last resort, lockers and garages were searched.

This wasn't illegal, even without a warrant, on a base. It's a whole different world inside the army bubble. As long as it doesn't involve children or animals, MPs get to pretty much go where we want and do what we want. But searching lockers isn't usually the first thing you do. Partly because we like doing some things more than others, and rooting through a fellow soldier's gear was low on the list of fun ways to spend a Saturday night. But it's also almost always a total waste of time. The kind of criminal who is retarded enough to leave stolen goods in a standard-issue storage locker to which the local Provost-Marshall usually an unofficial master key, wouldn't have made it through army selection process in the first place.

As expected, the searches had turned up nothing of substance, just like all the other covert enquiries had. So the Grayling CO, an armoured branch brigadier-general that I'd never heard of called Irwin, had done the next thing in the SOP, and switched from covert to overt.

Private, but widely-publicised, recorded interviews had taken place with anyone who either worked in or talked to the motor pool, going back from before the problems started. The gate guards got a lot more obviously thorough in searching vehicles on the way out of the base. The speed of the posting plot's merry-go-round moved up a notch, so that people came and went a little more rapidly.

Most visibly, barrack rooms got rousted in the middle of the night, with the searches being done by guys in pairs. One would do the search. The other one would distract the searchee by screaming provisions from the UCMJ at him.

Provisions that 'allow any search or other enquiry to take place without either prior notice to, or consent of, said individual at any time and any place for any purpose, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?' and then pretend to see the soldier nod at the end of it to indicate understanding, whether he'd actually nodded or not. Everybody would know that the solider most likely hardly understood a word of it. But soldiers generally agree with whatever senior noncoms tell them, whether it actually makes sense or not. Especially when it's four o'clock in the morning, the soldier is standing to attention in just his skivvies, and the noncom is a white-helmeted MP who is waving a baton around. The MP doing the yelling normally has more fun than the one doing the search. And definitely more than the soldier in skivvies.

The purpose of all this theatre wasn't just to remind the younger soldiers that it wasn't just during basic training that the army could wake you up at four in the morning without you being able to a damn thing about it. It was to point a flashlight into a corner full of cockroaches, metaphorically speaking. By following the direction the roaches scattered in, you might find the nest.

But it hadn't worked. Not only had nothing turned up, but the problems continued. Possibly because there really _was _nothing criminal going on. But probably because the cockroaches were smart enough to realise that all the shouting and yelling and searching was just a play, and that if they stayed calm and still, they could wait it out. And so they stayed calm and still, and waited it out.

So Irwin switched back to covert action. He asked us to send in an undercover guy. It was a brave move. It meant telling the world outside his own chain of command that he had a major problem that he couldn't fix by himself. Senior officers were very nervous about doing that. It's evolution in action. Junior officers who casually tell bad news to the wrong people get culled by the career system, and never become senior officers. They don't get the chance to pass on the faulty gene to subordinates. Irwin had done the right thing. But some very important people to his career – the ones _in _his chain of command – were going to see it differently.

4.

The next morning I got up, showered, and put on a set of BDUs that actually looked like they belonged to me. The hobo look wasn't really working for me. Plus, it might be the last day I got to be 'me' for a while. Best make the most of it, I thought.

The line of food in the BOQ was, as usual, stupendously well-populated. Before 'enough food to feed an army' became a cliché, it was a standard entry in some senior chef's operations manual. I'm no gourmet, but I love the army's chefs. There's an old joke that while it takes 48 hours for the human body to turn food into waste, an army cook can do it in fifteen minutes. Whoever thought it up was never in my army. These guys can produce a three-course meal in the middle of the jungle, using a trash can and a pile of sticks as an oven. With decent ingredients and the best equipment that Uncle Sam will buy, they do the nearest thing a mortal will see to alchemy. It's amazing. It's like watching entropy in reverse. It almost makes me embarrassed to have such simple tastes.

Almost. I loaded my tray with protein. Eggs, bacon and sausage; the three major food groups. I piled the plate so high that eventually stuff started to slide off the sides, and went to find somewhere to sit. I would have been happy to eat alone, but I spotted fellow MP captain Dave O'Donnell at an otherwise empty table, and joined him. Dave was easy to spot in a room – he was always the only one in immaculate uniform, no matter what the time was. In fact he wasn't just immaculate. It was as if his uniforms were more expensive than ours, like he bought them privately out of a catalogue. In a different world, he would have been an accountant, or an investment banker.

I sat opposite him. He raised his eyes from his own plate, and glanced down at my mine. He grimaced, then looked up at me, and waited.

I said nothing.

He looked at me straight in the face some more. Eventually he said '_Jesus_.'he said

'No, just me. Are you comparing me to the son of God?' I said.

'No, he had humility as a defining characteristic. I just couldn't believe that plate. Are you preparing for the apocalypse or something? You might have told me it was coming. Some friend you are.'

'I'm recovering from my own hell, I guess. The medics told me I need to build myself up after the weight I lost in the Gulf.'

'You got specifically told by a medic to eat an entire cattle herd every morning? Did he exhibit any other obvious signs of mental illness? I guarantee you, you carry on eating like that, you'll get a heart attack before you retire.'

'The guy who told me seemed sane enough. Drunk, admittedly, at the time. But sane. And anyway, he was a major. So if I don't do what he days, I will be refusing to obey a direct order. So what can I do?' I shrugged.

'Of course. That's you, always respectful of authority.'

'I am when it gives me an excuse to eat. Besides, I'm eating a lot, but I'm eating healthy. No carbohydrates.'

'All that means is that you'll turn into a portable chemical weapon system by lunch. At which the rest of the army will have to survive on potatoes and rice.'

'Each to his own. Beside, this might be the last decent meal I get in a while. Or at least that I get for free.'

'Don't try and tell me you're taking a vacation.' said Dave.

'Temporary duty. Michigan.'

'What the hell's happening in_ Michigan_? Is someone afraid the Canuks are going to invade across the Lakes or something?'

'Maybe, but that's not why they told me I'm going. Something at Grayling. People stealing things. Vehicle parts, probably.' Dave said nothing for a beat, thinking.

'Does sending you to Michigan to worry about a pile of missing spark plugs seem reasonable to you?'

'They're going to pay me for it. That's reasonable.' Dave thought for a moment again.

'Who's the CO there?' he asked.

'A tanker called Irwin. One-star. Why?'

'Because you wouldn't be going unless he wanted you there. So why does he want you there?'

'To solve a crime, presumably. That's what we do in the MPs. You should try it. It might be fun.'

'What, he doesn't have his own MPs? Why has he asked for someone off-post? Bit of a Hail Mary move isn't it? '

'His own people couldn't find anything. So he's thinking laterally. Nothing wrong with that.'

'They couldn't find anything, or they just didn't? And he's a tank general, for God's sake. Those guys' idea of thinking laterally is to swivel the turret around ninety degrees.'

'You think too much, Dave.'

'I read somewhere that's what we do in the investigative branch. You should try it sometime. It might be fun.'

I said nothing.

'Reacher, whether you find anything or not, he must know how it'll look to have called us for help. So he's either desperate, or stupid. And even though he's in the armoured branch, I don't think it's the second option. And one-stars don't get to be one-stars by seating the small stuff. So whatever he's desperate about, it's going to give you a bigger problem than your diet plan.'

'So stop giving me a hard time and let me eat.'

'I should. Maybe I should compared you to the son of god. If you're not careful, this might turn out to be your last supper.'

'Well then I beat him; I'm up earlier in the morning.'

'I'm sure that will make you feel better as they nail you to the cross. I'm serious – whatever's going on in Grayling, if it worried a general, it ought to worry you more.'

5.

Time spent gathering intelligence is never wasted. I had learned just about all I was going t by looking at the file for 'Perpetual'. The next step was to go and look at some actual vehicles. I'm no gasoline-head. I've never spent weekends staring in awe at monster trucks, or cooing with excitement watching cars throw themselves round an oval racetrack, again and again. But since Coolidge was supposed to be considering a change of profession, I needed to know enough to get by when people started talking about whatever was under the hood of military vehicles these days.

I walked over to the Rock Creek motor pool, and went into the office. A Specialist saw me come in, walked over to stand behind a counter, and braced up to attention.

'Morning sir!' he said,

'Morning. Have you got time to give a guy a guided tour of your fleet?'

'Can do, sir. You looking to buy, rent or borrow? We take cash, personal of company cheques, and all major plastic.' I smiled briefly.

'Borrow, eventually. But at the moment I'm just looking to learn a few things.'

'Ah, OK, sir. How long do you have?' The specialist had a confused expression. Like a research scientist in an obscure field might look if a member of the public had just wandered into his lab and asked about the project, out of nothing but curiosity.

'How long do you need?'

'We don't have much to show you really. Just soft-skinned stuff, no tracks. Basically all we have here is some civilian stuff painted green. An hour should cover the basics, then we can take it from there.'

'Sounds good to me. Can you do it now or should I come back?'

'If you could give me a minute, I'll need to get somebody to cover the desk. I'll see you outside in the park, sir?'

'Okay.' I nodded, and headed out of the office and into the parking area for the fleet. The vehicles may officially have been the army's, but to all practical purposes they belonged to the senior sergeant in the pool. He would let the right kind of person borrow them from time to time, but they were still his.


End file.
